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The Digital Marketing has become a force to reckon with, especially for a restaurant & food business.

It’s almost the end of 2018. You can’t avoid social media anymore. Everyone uses it, and at the very least, your small business should have an Instagram and Facebook page that you keep up-to-date with business information and hours. You should also be posting regularly (at least a couple of post a day) to keep your business fresh in the minds of consumers.

Choose the right platform, generally, for a small restaurant business, the rule of thumb is Instagram over FB and other social media. Yet you need an FB page to run your ads on Instagram. So, go ahead create both.

Now you have decided upon the platform, let’s analyse what to post, how to grow your audience, boost sales and establish a solid fan following for your food business.

High-quality photos

Arguably the very best way to promote your restaurant online is with high-quality, drool-inducing photos. Visual content is in high demand online these days, and having delicious looking photos on your social media outlets is an inherent way of attracting hungry eyes.

User-generated content

Lots of restaurants post the best images of their best dishes, but because there’s so much out there, you need to find a way to be different.

User-generated content is a great way to develop a personal and faithful bond with users. Host a photo contest by asking customers to share their favourite meal at your shop, and share them on your various social networks. Consider awarding some random lucky contestants with a free meal or other exciting offers!

Posting and promoting user-generated content shows customers that you appreciate them, turning occasional visitors into hardcore fans. Also, don’t be afraid to get feedback from your audience. Ask what their favourite dishes and desserts are. Reply to comments and engage.

Building a reputation

Social media allows brands to express their personality or communicate who they are to the world. Take this opportunity to introduce your cooks, stewards & management. Showing off your pleasant employees further provides significant reputation – happy workers say a lot about a business, and followers are sure to take notice of it.

Instead of going all promotional, give your audience interesting food tips, nutritional facts, ask them for their favourite combo or mix, Show them you care. Show them you bring them value.

Enhancing discoverability through hashtags

The power of using the right hashtags in Instagram is profoundly underestimated. It can drive huge post engagements and the chances of new people discovering your business are substantially increased.

Most popular Instagram foodie hashtags are

#foodie #food #foodporn #instafood #foodgasm #foodphotography #foodblogger #foodstagram #yummy #foodlover #delicious #instagood #foods #healthyfood #healthy #yum #foodpics #foodblog #tasty #foodpic #eat #lunch #breakfast #dinner #vegan #dessert #travel #foodiegram #healthylifestyle

Try to combine them with your city, food type and your brand name to get the best out of hashtags.

Influencer Marketing

Recommendations and word-of-mouth will always be the most powerful form of marketing. That doesn’t mean you need to sit around and wait for customers to start talking about your restaurant.

Invite local bloggers and restaurant critics to dine with you. Show off your latest ideas and newest dishes, then ask if they’ll post/write about you. There are even paid channels to get people with big social media followings to talk about you. Make it sure that your paid influencers have the right set of audience you are aiming for.

Simply put, influencer marketing is, instead of marketing to your target audience directly, you pay or inspire influential people in your niche to get the word out about you.

When it comes to social media users, influencers are basically the strongest referrals that your business can get.

Offers & Giveaways

Providing coupons and discounts for your restaurant is always a surefire way to bring customers to your doorstep. Make use of celebratory occasions, holidays, weekends to run social media campaigns framed around them, when combined with promotional offers like Buy one get one, Flat 20% etc., they favour to draw new customers & boost your sales.

Partner Up With Delivery Services

In today’s online-driven environment, convenience is the new necessity. Many online delivery services streamline the ordering process, and millennials love taking advantage of such delivery services.

Partner with food order & delivery services like:

• Zomato
• Uber eats
• Swiggy

Chances are many customers discover you for the first time through these services!

Google My Business Listings

Nothing rivals as a solid local search marketing strategy for small businesses.

Many consumers research online prior to choosing a restaurant in a new place. This is why it’s of vital importance that all your restaurant details are online and up-to-date, including address, phone number, hours and your current menu.

Local search marketing consists of claiming and optimizing your business’s online listings so that you show up in relevant local searches. There’s a lot to local search, but when it’s done right, it puts your business on the map so local consumers find you when they need your products or services. Thus making enrolling your business in “Google my business page” a mandatory one for every business, unless you are voluntarily trying to live under a rock.

And don’t be hesitant to ask for a google rating if you find your customers in good mood. In today’s era of the Internet, reviews drive business. It’s that simple and you have to do something about it. It can be even as simple as having a poster in the dining area/counter asking for a good review for your business.

Power of Geo-Targeted Ads

Geo-targeted ads help you save money, ensuring that only users in certain cities or within a specific radius see your ads (eliminating non-relevant engagements, which can cost you hefty Ad money).

Many online advertising services, from Google Ads to Facebook and Twitter, offer geo-targeting Ad options. Be sure to take advantage of these handy targeting features to get your best ads in front of your best customers.

Facebook has many ad types that can be used to help you build more local awareness, drive to targeted landing pages and get you more followers. No matter your goal, there’s probably a Facebook ad type that will work for you. Be careful, though. Advertising is another one of those things that are better left to the experts. Without experience or knowledge of proper targeting, you may end up losing money.

We know It’s hard for restaurant owners to be able to handle all of the moving parts of their business and become digital marketing experts at the same time. If you’re new to SEO and digital marketing for your restaurant, it can be overwhelming.

Don’t worry! We are here to help. Get in touch with us. We help you craft the best digital marketing plan for your business, all while you can focus on your business.

Right platform & audience

Choose the right platform depending on what kind of audience you serve – whether you are B2B or B2C, what goals you want to achieve through your social media efforts – like to increase brand awareness, sell products online or to increase video views.

Here’s a list of hot social media platforms and their audience type.

• Facebook – Almost everyone has a Facebook account. Particularly good for news/entertainment related content.
• LinkedIn – A professional network that is perfect for B2B audiences. Great for establishing contacts, recruiting, content publishing and distributing.
• Instagram – If you have millennials as your target segment then Instagram is an incredibly valuable social platform. Also, a perfect platform if your content is highly visual. Images and short videos work incredibly well on this platform.
• Twitter – From the latest news or the latest meme you can find anything on twitter. It’s a great platform to engage in real time with your audience and has a high chance of making your content going viral than other platforms.

Content Plan

Post relevant & high-quality images. Make a definitive content plan and strict to it. Keep your content valuable to the audience, make sure they derive some value out of the post.

Your ideal content plan should consist of 70% non-promotional posts and 30% promotional posts. There is nothing wrong in promoting your product but it has to be done in a non-spammy way, by keeping the direct marketing posts to a bare minimum. Design posts in advance and schedule them accordingly. Analyse what’s performing well and what’s not and make changes to the content plan accordingly. Do more of what’s working out well.

Establishing authenticity

It’s easy to get lost in the sea of other similar brands trying to do the same. But you can always stand-out if you take some extra efforts. This can be done by following specific design guidelines and brand voice for all your brand posts such that audience can instantly recognise your brand from the way your posts have been designed and from the tone of the language used in the caption. This will help you a long way in establishing a strong brand identity in the crowded online place.

Promotions

Social media is one of the most cost-effective and ROI trackable sources of ad medium in the current scenario. But promoting a poorly designed or not well-targeted ad is like throwing money down the drain, you’ll get nothing fruitful out of it. Decide your desired outcome out of the promotion and choose the promotion plan accordingly, like brand awareness, link click or reach. Make use of audience segmentation, demographics or geo-location targeting. When you combine a certain type of these filters, you will be able to reach to get the most relevant audience or potential customers which will, in turn, increase your Return On Ad Spend (ROAS).

Being active

Engage with the audience, reply to their comments. Be active and social. We have seen many brands after putting in all the efforts and garnering comments, do the dire mistake of not engaging back with the community. This will make the audience lose interest in page over time and your brand may have lost a lifetime loyal customer. Just simple things like replying back can leave a huge impact on your audience.

If the main objective of your website is to make your visitors get in touch with you, then, Keep contact option easy to find, so a visitor can quickly get in touch should they need it while going through your website.

Give people what they want - Instead of having the form as the only mode of option for contacting you, Include an email and phone number, so visitors can quickly get in touch with you if they wish. Give them the fastest and easiest way to connect to you.

Link to active social media accounts like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn to give visitors a way to get to know you better and to engage with your business.

Keep your contact us page short, sweet and to the point. Avoid unnecessary fields and words so your page remains as straightforward and simple as possible.Many businesses while copywriting their contact page - mistake being crispier for being too professional. Sounding too professional would make you bit boring unless you deliberately try to be one. The more friendly you make your page’s copy, the better you’ll make your visitors feel and better chances of them turning into a prospect.

• If you are a big organization or a company providing various services under one banner, chances are that a lot of different types of people are visiting your website - and what these people want to contact about can vary widely. You can segment/filter the audience at the very initial stage by providing them with different contact options/types to choose from – instead of having all under the same roof.

• Having some fields like the ones that ask for mobile number would prevent users from filling up the form out of privacy concerns. While asking for such information that are not mandatory but would be an added advantage - make them as an optional field and distinguish them, common and widely known way of doing it is to use asterisk mark (*) to mark mandatory fields or to write down ‘optional’ near the label of the fields that are optional.

• Use proper placeholder texts to guide users while they fill up the form. In an attempt to shorten the length of a form or reduce visual noise, designers use placeholder text as an input label. This practice places the burden on short-term memory of the user. The label disappears as soon as the user clicks or types. The entry must be deleted to expose the label again.For best results, avoid using placeholder texts as input label. Create clear hints that are placed outside form fields. For better user-friendliness, move the placeholder content above the input field, but below the label.

• Make sure your forms are mobile friendly. If your mobile visitors cannot easily read, complete and submit your form, you may lose their business. Make sure you minimize the number of form fields, use a single column layout and to have a clear action button. Also, avoid crowded drop-downs (example - country/state selection), instead use the auto-complete feature that completes the text as users input the initial letters.If you want to take mobile form design a step further and ensure your entire website is functional on all types of devices, you can implement a responsive website design. Responsive web design takes the user’s screen size, platform, orientation, and environment into consideration. This is a simple and effective way to create a great user experience irrespective of kind of device being used.

• If you have a form, you’ll get spam. That’s the bitter truth. So you need a way to block spammers from flooding your form submissions. For a considerable period of time, the accepted anti-bot measure was CAPTCHA - a program designed to protect against spam bots by generating tests that only humans could pass. Up until recently, Google announced CAPTCHA’s death. The best alternative is to use reCAPTCHA. Instead of going through the cumbersome process of identifying bizarre texts, users had only to click a button to identify themselves as human. In terms of security and user experience, reCAPTCHA is a significant augmented form of its previous version.

• Once users click the Send/Submit button, redirect them to a thank you page that explains what to expect next as in when and how you’ll be contacting them back and links to helpful content and resources. This page can also be used as a checkpoint to measure a number of conversions i.e the number of people who have successfully submitted your contact form, by using page view feature in google analytics, in case you have integrated google analytics with your website.
• So what if an error has occurred and users couldn’t submit the form. You have to put up an error message text not just saying an error has occurred instead of a proper indication of why and where the error has occurred so that it would be easier for the user to rectify it. Read more about form validation and errors.

User Experience is all about how we perceive it, how we use it, and how we remember it.This “it” can be anything, here in our case it’s gonna be websites.

UX has evolved from being a noun to become a verb. We often hear our clients say “We need you to UX our website…How much you charge for UXing… Come up with a better UX…How long to UX it? UX this…UX that.”

In this blog, we will see what are things you should add/change on your website to make its user experience, a delight. In other words, How to UX your website.

Note: This blog post is written with non-e-commerce websites in mind, yet some ideas can also be applied for the same.

1. The On-boarding / landing page experience

By any means don’t have a dead screen on landing. By dead screen, we mean a landing page loaded with hefty content and nothing in particular, to emphasize on or to capture the attention of the audience. Once a website has made a negative first impression on us, chances are we will not enjoy our visit much or look forward to coming back. The chances are they had already visited dozens of website before landing on your page, so the point here is to give them a great first impression, all the while staying relevant to their expectation.

It may be as simple as having a bright background image, minimalist design with rich white space, background video/GIF, mouse over animations or any interactive elements.

Few ideas:

Making people spend a little more time on your landing section may have a huge impact on your Google search ranking. It’s a win-win. Read More.

Note:

Some people confuse being dead with being minimal in design. Minimalism in web design means simplifying the interface by removing unnecessary elements. Being minimal is great but being uninteresting is entirely a different thing. Let’s be clear, You can always be minimal & interesting at the same time.

2. Limit the content. Refine the words.

“Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left.” — Steve Krug

Having a load of contents will seriously affect the user experience. As people get bored quickly and skip the sections without even reading what’s written. Be super stingy about the number of words you put out there. Use precise words and sentences. Quality is important over quantity — Hit the bull’s eye. Don’t restrict yourselves to the mundane choice of words under the tag of professionalism. Use a happy or natural tone of speech or come-up with your own brand voice.

Use high-quality catchy visuals where ever you find it relevant & possible.
For most sections 70% Visual & 30% Content Rule holds good. Visual appeal plays a large part in establishing brand affinity with your website visitors.

As they say ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’ — and it’s especially relevant when it comes to communicating on a more emotional level. Use only high-quality images/illustrations. In 2018, it feels like custom artworks/illustrations are taking the center stage of visual content. Through pictures and other visual elements, you can convey feelings that aren’t possible to express by words or otherwise would have taken a paragraph.

In text-heavy sections (like testimonials/pricing details/forms etc.,), give even more importance to White Spaces & Text Hierarchy. It will give a clean & clutter-free look.

Notes:

White Space — White space or negative space is any type of blank space on the page. White spaces don’t necessarily mean to be white; the blank space may be filled with any colour as long as it is free of any elements like text or images.

Text Hierarchy — is a system for organizing type that establishes an order of importance within the data, allowing the reader to easily find what they are looking for and navigate the content.

Brand Voice — is the purposeful, consistent expression of a brand through words and prose styles, that engage and motivate. The personality of your brand is often determined by the words you use and the sentences you write.

3. Live chat. It’s a must-have.

The reasons are quite self-explanatory. The main reason being addressing the people’s concern then & there. It also has a high lead capture rate compared to the age-old contact us forms.
It also acts as a magic portal, u can expect all sort of wild things coming out of it like user feedback, lead generation, project enquiry, job opportunities, even out of the blue ones like you are being called as a chief guest to judge an app building hackathon in your region, which actually happened in our case.

People now are looking to make their chatting and support process over the internet, more interactive and intelligent. For this, leverage the advantage of having a chat bot which makes make your website more lively and interactive and also they return results faster comparatively.
There is good number of chat plugins out there — Fresh chat, Crisp, Landbot and more. Choose the one that suits your business.

4. Delicate things that matter — Micro Animations

Micro-animations are small, preferably functional animations that support the user by giving visual feedback and displaying changes more clearly. With micro-animations, it’s possible to explain a lot without using a word. These micro animations make interactions more pleasant & visually pleasing.

If there is anything that gonna differentiate your website from most of the websites out there, trust us, this is gonna be it. These tiny tiny detailing add up to give a profound influence on the user experience aspect of your website.

5. Finding the sweet spot between uniformity & variation

If you have a multi-page website, you would never want all your pages to be monotonous. Don’t have the same layout on every page and keep changing the content alone. This makes the experience a very very boring one. The same applies to different sections of the page.
Come-up with variations in layouts. There is a whole lot of layouts for web pages out there. Choose the one that best suits your content. But at the same time be cautious to not overdo it to the extent it feels like each page belongs to a different website, which will eventually leave the user confused & frustrated. It’s all about finding the sweet spot between uniformity & variation. You can retain the uniformity by maintaining — sustained color usage, font & button styling and other visual cues. Sticking with same menu bar/header and footer design will also make the multi-page websites more visually composed.

Related read:
Examples of content stream layout

6. And those annoying pop-ups — the workaround

Don’t use pop-up forms unless & until it is really really relevant and you are out of any other options. Pop-up forms are becoming highly outdated technique and anything inside the popup is considered as a bait nowadays. Most poorly designed popup forms, only serves the purpose of obstructing the user flow.

According to Hubspot, A good popup form should be designed with following aspects in mind:

1.Offer something relevant and valuable.

2.Think about the way people engage with your pages.

3.Use language that’s specific, actionable, and human.

4.Don’t ruin the mobile experience.

Read: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/pop-up-forms-analysis

But still, we don’t recommend using pop-up forms instead we insist you to blend the form as effectively as possible with your content and context (interaction and timing). By doing so, In most of the use cases, the necessity of pop-up can be eliminated — for example, Consider placement of blog subscription forms/check list/e-book download links in Medium.

Too Small too Big:

Smaller card can go unnoticed at the same time a bigger card might not fit in the wallet so both could go unnoticed! So choose your size carefully – prefer standard size. The standard dimensions of a printed business card are 3.5 x 2 inches. That’s the finished card size. In the metric system, the standard business card size is 8.9 x 5.1 cm (centimeters) or 88.9 x 50.8 mm (millimeters).

Color/Font:

Your overall colour and design of the business card should align with your brand elements and style. Read more on branding. Some people have very small font for the important details like phone number/email – no use of the card then because more than half of the people you hand-out your card will probably be aged and will struggle to read smaller texts, also card with no contrast color for background against the text will worsen the readability further.

Content is the king:

If the card doesn’t convey what you do? Plz dontwaste your money printing it. Have the services u do in a simple term that everyone can understand, keep contact info prominent. Make sure we are not stuffing too much content in the card.

Proofreading:

Most people don’t give importance to proof read the card before printing, this is the very important step and should not be skipped, a typo or misalignment, missing of important info will ruin the card totally.

Material is the queen:

All good things can go in vain if the customer feels a cheap stupid card in their hand, choose the print material wisely glossy/mate etc. Choose the one that align with your design theme.

Downloading from the free sources:

Printing directly from press or downloading from the internet is on raise now, so most people have very similar card. There is a chance that a customer will end up with 2 cards of different companies with the same design. So spend time deciding your card and come up with a unique card.

For example, in our Webchirpy business card, we explained how we designed our logo, this makes our card unique and at the same time explain the workflow of our business which is designing.

webchirpy business card

Print quantity:

Printing more card seems beneficial but it is generally a wrong assumption, how frequent we are going to give card -1 card per day, that way we can give only 365 cards. So how long it will take for you to give your 5000 cards ? 16 years. By that time not only your design but your business will be outdated. Numbers matter. So, Choose wisely. Print the right quantity and update your card regularly. Reach us to get your card updated.

Social media:

Social media is nowadays a key medium to build brand awareness, credibility and for marketing. People have also started contacting businesses through social media, you can respond to your client queries and concerns right then & there and win back their trust & loyalty. It is now a must to add social media links.

Get updated – Use QR:

With almost all people having smartphones – QR scanning is what that can instantly connect your physical business material to your digital world. It can be used to take the audience instantly your website, specially designed landing page, social media profile etc.,

Whatsapp Business:

With arrival of Whatsapp for Business, now it’s such an ease to be in touch with your audience and share the content or marketing materials directly with them. It’s unconventional approach and quick response time make it the most preferred choice for the users. So, don’t forget to include your business whatsapp number in your business card.